nytheatre Archive
2001-02 Theatre Season Reviews

Though A Narrow Bed has only five characters, it is nevertheless something of an epic play. Its concerns are the effects of the Vietnam Era--the war and the culture of protest that emerged in response to it--on a generation of Americans. Megan, the play's protagonist, is the wife (widow, actually) of a soldier who has been MIA for fifteen years (the play is set in 1987). She lives on a commune, or the remnants of one, in upstate New York, with her married best friends Lucy and Willie and their 3-year-old son; they are the only survivors of an idealistic experiment in group living that has lost, over a decade and a half, numerous members to the more secure and less rigorous life of suburbia and Wall Street.

Now Willie lies in a hospital bed, apparently dying of a pancreatitis, brought on by years of unchecked alcoholism. Lucy is struggling to keep herself mentally sound and to revive her husband's waning will to live. This current and very serious crisis causes Megan to finally re-evaluate her own choices, and hopefully let go of the long-held memory of her lost husband John.

Playwright Ellen McLaughlin uses the twin stories of Megan and John and Lucy and Willie to examine a host of pressing questions: Should a man who was morally opposed to the Vietnam War have allowed himself to serve in it? Did the peace/protest movement accomplish anything? Who were the real heroes of that conflicted era? A Narrow Bed is ambitious and perhaps even a bit diffuse: it's packed with provocative ideas and insights, all ripe for the picking. I think each audience member will gravitate toward some of McLaughlin's themes and avoid others.

Me, I was drawn to one of the play's most enduring notions, the idea that a life not lived fully is a life wasted. McLaughlin gives us three exhibits to review in the characters of John, Willie, and Megan. The playwright's politics make it clear that she thinks John gave up his life to an empty and worthless cause; the question, here, is whether Willie and Megan, who have drifted for fifteen years in respective hazes of drink and martyrdom, have in their own way done the same thing.

This is a difficult piece, and a timely one; Poppins Productions is to be commended for mounting it so successfully in this off-off-Broadway presentation. Director Anthony King provides a thoughtful staging that shrewdly uses every nook and cranny of the Wings Theatre stage (though you might want to avoid the first couple of rows if you don't like craning your neck to see). His cast is first-rate. Maria Alaina Mason is effective as the grieving widow Megan, while Rachel Fowler runs the gamut of emotions, quite believably, as the mercurial Lucy. Joseph Langham, seen just a couple of months ago in An Evening with Harburg Harrisbrandt, demonstrates his range as the dying Willie, showing us both the strengths and vulnerabilities of this appealing but sad character. Clint McCown is vivid in the smaller role of John, as is Liza Skinner as Willie's nurse.

Melissa Levine, who is a student at Hunter College, provides an appropriate and attractive soundtrack in the form of a collection of original folk-style songs. And before the show and at intermission, the very engaging musician Dan Walters and singer Holly Slyter get us into the spirit of A Narrow Bed by leading a sing-a-long of '60s favorites from Peter, Paul and Mary, The Beatles, and others.

I'm not one to question the artistic decision-making of a theatre company, but I have to tell you that Atlantic Theatre Company's decision to stage An Adult Evening with Shel Silverstein baffles me. It's an evening of ten one-act plays by the author most famous for the children's book Where The Sidwalk Ends. Why anyone would think these mostly decades-old works deserve an airing today is beyond me.

Silverstein's oeuvre, as represented here, is decidedly nasty. But he's neither as moral as Roald Dahl nor as playfully macabre as Edward Gorey. What he is, is mean.

The evening begins with One Tennis Shoe, in which a husband tells his wife, as gently as he can, that he fears she is turning into a bag lady. Politically incorrect, but amusing, this turns out to be the highpoint of the show. Next is Bus Stop, in which a strange man taunts a woman by reciting as many synonyms for breast as he can come up with. She retaliates with an equal number of slang words for penis.

Going Once features an auctioneer selling a woman to the highest bidder. The Best Daddy shows us a little girl whose father tells her that her birthday present is a dead pony. Later he corrects himself and tells her it's her dead sister.

The Lifeboat is Sinking depicts a married couple in bed, playing a game in which the husband is supposed to choose–from among the wife, their daughter, and his mother–whom he will throw out of their sinking lifeboat. After this play–which I don't think will make too many World Trade Center survivors crack a smile–came intermission. My companion and I glanced at each other, headed for the exit, and never looked back. Life's too short to waste on stuff as vile as this.

On the one hand, Max Frisch's play Andorra seems to be about the insidious evil of stereotyping: a young man who has been brought up believing he is Jewish in an overwhelmingly Christian community chooses to "become" the pushy, money-grubbing outsider that bigotry demands. On the other hand, Andorra may be viewed as a parable on the Holocaust, in which the presumably good and moral citizens of a town do evil when confronted with a relentless enemy and provided with a convenient scapegoat.

Indeed, both views of the play were aired after its premiere in 1961; and both views can be supported—somewhat—by the revival that has just opened off-Broadway, produced by Theatre for a New Audience, directed by Liviu Ciulei and newly translated by Michael Feingold. But unfortunately this production only hints at the sweep and potency that Frisch's play might have; on the basis of this show alone, one would wonder why anyone would choose to present it (and in fact a large number of audience members voted with their feet and failed to return from intermission at the performance reviewed).

The problems with this Andorra are legion. Feingold's stiff, stilted prose makes the characters all sound like they're speaking in a language that is not their native tongue. Ciulei's staging is at turtle's-pace and fails to clarify whether the piece is to be taken as realistic or allegorical. Performances consistently lack conviction and characterization, with the notable exception of Laurie Kennedy, who finds a soul in the false Jew's mother against the odds.

It's 2-1/2 hours of rather stultifying, bewildering theatre. Are we supposed to get swept up in the story? Presumably not: the synopsis in the program reveals the ending. Are we supposed to draw conclusions about the human condition? Hard to do: we don't seem to be in the presence of beings who behave anything like humans.

In the end, my curiosity about this play got piqued, and my research suggests that a production of Andorra may well be worth seeing. But not this one.

Blue Window is a sweet, wistful play about a group of New Yorkers who gather for a dinner party one Sunday night, and then go home. Playwright Craig Lucas has populated it with quirky but likable characters who are enough like us to keep the thing accessible; at the same time, he's given them idiosyncratic individual histories that keep us from ever connecting entirely with any of them. In particular, Blue Window's protagonist, an appealing but woefully unconfident young woman named Libby, is haunted by a sadness most of us--thankfully--will never have to endure. I had thought, with God's Heart and The Dying Gaul and Stranger, that Lucas's pessimism was a relatively new phenomenon; Blue Window proves that it's not.

That's not to suggest, by the way, that Blue Window isn't entertaining; but rather to affirm that the melancholy underlying it is real and authentic. Blue Window is, in fact, mostly very funny, especially in this sparkling staging by Julia Gibson. It begins in five different apartments, all represented by a single set on the stage, in which Libby and her six guests are seen preparing for the dinner. They are: Alice, a modestly famous novelist, and Boo, her lover; Tom, a musician, and Emily, his current girlfriend; Griever, Libby's closest friend; and Norbert, a newcomer to the group who is Libby's skydiving instructor. Gibson and her cast turn this first scene into a (mostly) wordless tour de force, prepping us for a memorable party.

We're not let down. Lucas, Gibson, and the cast capture the awkwardness and artifice of the Dinner Party, and the collision of self-consciousness, politeness, and ego that shapes the dynamic of a room full of people who mostly don't know each other very well. It feels as natural as the real thing, but lots more comfortable because we get to eavesdrop rather than participate.

And though the final scene, of post-mortems back at everyone's respective homes, has a significantly lower energy level than the rest of the play, well, that's in keeping with the realism of the play, too.

The ensemble cast is superb. Marin Hinkle is terrific as Libby, showing us the real person beneath a mound of insecurities. Neal Huff is winning and sympathetic as best friend Griever, and Jason Kolotouros is appealing as the somewhat enigmatic Norbert. Josh Stamberg and Katy Hansz have some great moments as Tom and Emily; watch Hansz, for example, react when Stamberg's character plays some particularly abstruse music on the stereo, to the restrained horror of the other guests.

Hope Chernov and Marcis DeBonis, as Alice and Boo respectively, do excellent work, centering the piece with their portrayal of a challenging, evolving relationship of unmistakable strength.

In Mac Wellman’s Cleveland, the young girls of Our Lady of the Bleeding Knuckles High School are obsessed with what’s “fashionable.” But while the girls are enamored with the current style, Wellman is in love with fashion in a different sense. “Fashion” comes from the Latin verb facere, to make, and at its root, the noun “fashion” refers to the configuration of something, its underlying structure. In Cleveland, Wellman takes the world of middle America, locates the fashion of the thing, and then transforms familiar Americana into something delightfully unfamiliar. The production running at the Flea channels the play’s awe-inspiring oddness into a terrific and taut 45-minute spectacle. The show (directed by Jim Simpson) ranks as my favorite of Wellman’s numerous productions in New York this year.

Mother (Irene Walsh) and daughter Joan (Kate Benson) wax philosophical about a clogged sink, Marxism and who will be Joan’s prom date. Meanwhile, a Strange Man (Simone White) narrates each scene in what could be best described as a whacked-out Russian accent; s/he is always observing and fashioning what transpires on stage. The daughter’s gang of girlfriends from Bleeding Knuckles are all deeply fashionable, but Joan can’t seem to keep up with them. With Joan’s date destined to be an awkward boy by the name of Panda Hands (David Runco), we have the makings of Catholic-angst galore, but what we discover is far weirder. It appears that mother and daughter are members of alien races at war with each other. Identities in the world of this Cleveland suburb are fluid at best and the play makes the most of that shifting landscape of pubescent awkwardness and alien sputter-speak.

In Simpson, Wellman has found a wonderful directorial partner. Each scene emerges with a focus and clarity that sweeps you along, and the young cast members of the Bat repertory fully commit to Wellman’s world. These are not characters who speak to convey meaning; the profundity exists on the surface. A Wellman monologue ends not because there has been a build and a resolution, but because the speaker is exhausted. Speaking ceases because it has reached its physical end. Though all this perhaps reeks of a fashionable postmodernism, Simpson’s production achieves something far greater. The pacing and energy of the show are dead-on and the production is deeply exciting. The entire cast deserves praise for their potent performances, but special notice should go to Simone White whose Strange Man is an engrossing and stunning Brechtian narrator.

Cleveland is a downtown must-see. It is one of the happiest evenings that I have spent in the theatre in the past few weeks. I urge you to see not only Cleveland, but also to check out some of the Flea’s other offerings, including the American melodrama No Mother to Guide Her, Ajax, and Wellman’s Sincerity Forever. Though it may be unfashionable to admit, these events conjure up the excitement one must have felt seeing avant-garde theatre in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when change (of a theatrical nature and otherwise) still seemed possible. And that is a good thing in times such as these.

Just a day or two after I saw Inside Arts' revival of E.L. Doctorow's 1978 play Drinks Before Dinner, newspaper headlines announced George W. Bush's activation of the "shadow government" to provide continuity in the event of a national catastrophe. In the play, a character says, on the subject of just such a catastrophe:

They would make some astounding selfless effort of organization to save some children. There would be help from the government, but it would be secret and unofficial.

No need to search for relevance here: Inside Arts, and Doctorow, seem prodigiously prescient just now.

The same character goes on to say:

The same flaw in the human race that destroys it provides the conspiracy of survivors with the responses that save it. The same insufficient humanity that brings doom provides a few people with the insensitive strength to plan beyond the doom.

And later, about the cynical yuppie party guest who brought the whole subject of apocalyptic events up in the first place:

You're one of the beneficiaries of a society that has provided more to its own than any other in the history of civilization. You're one of those useless beneficiaries who is given everything but respects nothing—one of those hypocrites of privilege who condemns everything but relinquishes nothing.

Doctorow has pretty much written my review for me; there's almost nothing else to say except that the harsh truths that emerge in this uncompromising and, yes, flawed play, are necessary to hear. Drinks Before Dinner, which is about what happens when a discontented guest hijacks—literally—a cocktail party, is contrived and talky and, most of the time, as untheatrical as it is unbelievable. And yet: throughout, the conversation—rhetoric, more like—is bitterly profound, filled with insights we'd rather squelch; and at its climax—the nature of which I resolutely refuse to reveal—Doctorow's vision proves baldly, inhumanly clear. Drinks Before Dinner is not an entertaining experience, but it's a worthy one. It's a promising start for Inside Art, a company earnestly interested in doing socially responsible theatre.

Director Darcelle Marta has opted to stage Drinks Before Dinner in a real art gallery rather than in a traditional theatre, shifting the play's setting from a private cocktail party to a more public one. It's an interesting choice that doesn't quite work: Doctorow's play is bound irrevocably to the fourth wall and the artifice it portends; putting us directly into the mix, while provocative, reinforces the phoniness of the play's set-up.

In other respects, though, Marta's work is certainly effective. Some cast members seem to lack the experience to successfully tackle this difficult work; the ones who fare best are Dee Dee Friedman and David Palmer Brown as the married couple who are the party's hosts, Karin Bowersock as a very self-involved artist, and Gerald Marsini as the malcontent guest (though Marsini is about twenty years too young for the role). Eleven-year-old Sean Geoghan is remarkably good as a youngster made to entertain the adult guests at the gathering.

Note: I saw Eat the Runt in its original off-off-Broadway production about a year ago. (I loved it.) It's now moved to the American Place Theatre, where I saw it again. I sat down to write a new review, but realized that most of what I said last year about this remarkable, original comedy is still what I want to say about it today. So what you will read below is a hybrid--a lot of last year's review, plus some new material about the new production at the bottom.

Eat the Runt tells the story of a job interview. Merritt is a finalist for the position of Grants Manager at an art museum. Today, Merritt is being interviewed by Jean, the Human Resources Coordinator; Royce, the museum's Director of Development; Hollis, a modern art Curator at the museum; Sidney, a Trustee; and Pinky, the Museum Director. Chris, a Grants Coordinator who is also up for the job, is ushering Merritt around from meeting to meeting.

We all know the drill; or we think we do. Eat the Runt immediately subverts our expectations of this cut-and-dried process with Merritt indelicately referencing, just moments after stepping into Jean's office, a recent bout of hemorrhoids. Merritt manages to disarm us and each of the interviewers at every turn, in scenes that are brilliant set pieces of--alternately--satire and comic flights of fancy. Merritt lectures one interviewer about the oppression of African-Americans and another about the joys of Ayn Rand: exposed and explored throughout are supposed truths and the lies bubbling just beneath them--or is it the other way around? It's surreal, it's treacherous, and it's sweet; and it culminates in an Act One curtain that this cagey old theatregoer certainly didn't see coming. The even cleverer second act tops it and caps it deliciously. And it's all so craftily littered with surprises that I can't reveal a bit of it to you.

Yet--and this is why I'm so excited about Eat the Runt--there's much more going on here than gleeful sabotage of sacrosanct institutions. Avery Crozier, the astonishing young playwright who created Eat the Runt, is toying with ideas of perception, political correctness, and societal and cultural norms throughout this play, and always on multiple levels. For example, we see each of the interviewers in action twice, and each time we see them from entirely different perspectives; likewise Merritt and Chris assume or acquire different characteristics every time we meet them. Crozier's not being sloppy, he's being profound: don't we all stumble through the world trying, mostly, to parse the often conflicting information that bombards us?

So the idea of casting Eat the Runt afresh at each performance (see "About the Show," above, for more information) really resonates. (So, too, does Crozier's notion of building this play around a job interview: where else do perceptions and expectations collide and cohere so wantonly?)  Because this particular company of actors includes people of various sexes, races, sizes, and shapes--and because Crozier has cannily written this play to exploit such a mixture--each scene is going to feel and work differently each time it's done.

The fearless actors participating in Eat the Runt are all worthy of commendation. They are: Kelli K. Barnett, Linda Cameron, LaKeith Hoskin, Weil Richmond, Thom Rivera, Keesha Sharp, Curtis Mark Williams, Jama Williamson. At the performance I attended Hoskin, Richmond, Rivera, and Williamson drew the meatiest roles--or is it that their roles felt flashiest because they occupied them? In any event, all eight are fine (though I think the producers might want to reconsider the mix of sizes, shapes, and colors represented by the current cast: last year's ensemble felt more diverse, which serves the piece better).

I also have some reservations about the new "casting" process. The high-tech voting equipment is fun; but having the actors "audition" seems to remove some of the randomness from the process. I don't think anyone's consciously subverting the production's intent or anything, but it's hard for actors not to telegraph "cues" to the audience about which role they ought to be playing.

My 2000 review ended with this thought: "Eat the Runt is a play to see over and over again, not just because it's such devilishly grand fun, but because with each permutation we're going to learn something new about these characters and about ourselves." Interestingly, a second viewing--even a year after the first--suggests I may have been wrong: the lessons of Eat the Runt's unique casting concept don't feel as profound once the play's surprises have been spent. But--emphatically--this is a show to see at least once: it's smart, sassy, funny, and devastatingly original.

Mario Fratti has created a delicious evening of fun with his Erotic Adventure in Venice. No, it is not the eroticism of today’s performance art; nor is it in any way sexually enticing. Rather it is the eroticism reminiscent of countless Italian artists of the 16^th century updated to the 20^th with a tongue-in-cheek hint of the irony that exists in the modern world.

Ostensibly, the play concerns the scandal in Italian politics, which took place in 1991-2. Bribery was widespread and when uncovered led to the downfall of many prominent politicians. To escape prosecution many of these politicians ran and hid in disparate locales, even in mausoleums in well-known cemeteries.

Our tour guide for the evening is Guido (Mika Duncan). Good looking, charismatic, and willing to go with the tide, he narrates his adventures beginning as a saxophonist with an orchestra performing at a café, then tells us of his three years in New York City as the boy toy of an American lady who picks him up at the café and takes him home with her and finally back to Italy where the action begins. The narration is quick, fast and funny, interspersed with short selections on the sax. When he hangs up the saxophone we know the story has begun.

Guido has no job when he returns, so he turns to his good friend, Senator ‘M’ (Dave DeChristopher), known for his beneficence to his supporters and friends and soon to be indicted for his many years as a politician on the take. The Senator secures Guido a job on a remote island which is home to a well-known Venetian cemetery where rest the tombs of Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Ezra Pound, among others. Guido recounts the hilarious stories of tourists who want to be photographed with or pay homage to the resting places of these famous folk. He quickly learns that there is money to be made keeping these people happy and, also, that some people are just in need of a temporary home.

Elena (Jennifer Herzog) and Alfio (Ross Stoner) are one such couple. He is the estranged son of a very rich businessman; she is his soon-to-be wife if only he had an income. She tells him to get a job. He rehearses her in the art of mimicking his late mother’s voice. Courtesy of Guido, they live in the family mausoleum with Alfio’s dead mother. Honest work, according to Fratti, loses out. In a series of very comical scenes, Alfio inherits the business and the millions after Elena takes command of the situation. He promises to marry her immediately and as a reward gives Guido the mausoleum for his own.

Now that Guido is an entrepreneur he can hide the Senator after the bribery scandals hit and can conduct an extremely enterprising and monetarily rewarding business in kinky sex, busily conducted by his wife Dora (Caroline Strong). If you expect everyone to live happily ever after on this lovely island, don’t: though Fratti has served up a joyous romp here, he's also harboring no illusions about the constant corruptibility of humankind.

The setting by Floyd Gumble is absolutely perfect and far more elaborate than the La MaMa stage usually hosts. The production is not as fast moving as it should be: director Dan Friedman's touch feels more contemporary American than continental European, which is what the play probably requires.. Mika Duncan as Guido gives a fine performance and the other actors, including Zenobia Shroff who plays a variety of different women, lend able support. This is a real laugh-out-loud fun time but when you leave, there’s still a lot to think about.

Exit the King felt to me like the anti-Skin of Our Teeth: a play beyond despair, about the utter hopelessness of human existence. Less than two weeks after Setpember 11, it certainly wasn't what I was in the mood for.

I wonder if this production--billed as the first significant revival of this late play of Eugene Ionesco since its New York bow some 34 years ago--has gotten things too dour. I didn't know this play, but the other Ionescos I've seen (e.g., Rhinoceros, The Chairs) have worn the absurdity of their situations more visibly on their sleeves. But this show, directed by Joseph Hardy for the stalwart Pearl Theatre Company, offers us almost nothing to laugh at.

The premise of Exit the King is that King Berenger I is going to die in 90 minutes--at the end of this very play, we are told. In attendance are his first wife, Queen Marguerite, sour but pragmatic; his second wife, Queen Marie, sensual and ever-hopeful; a maid; a doctor; and a guard, who doubles as court crier, calling out pronouncements to the audience at key moments. Berenger is presented as a kind of Everyking, embodying the worst abuses of power, nature, and fellow creatures that Western Civilization is certainly guilty of. It's clear that King Berenger's imminent demise is of his own making, a Hiroshima-like finale to a long life of short-sighted self-interest.

Heavy stuff. Is there something that Hardy and his cast could have done to lighten it?

Maybe. Michael Nichols, who plays the Guard, strikes a tone of self-aware pomposity that feels jokey and purposeful at the same time: he made me smile and even (very occasionally) chuckle in the face of the catastrophe playing out on stage. Robert Hock, Carol Schultz, and Celeste Ciulla, on the other hand, as the King and his Queens, are at once so intense and so controlled that the direness of their characters' circumstances feels horribly immediate and acute.

It could be, of course, that there really is nothing to laugh at in Exit the King. But it is the product of a human, albeit a disheartened one. So I have to wonder...

So who's the fool for love in 29th Street Rep's magnetic rendition of Sam Shepard's 1983 play? My vote goes to the Old Man, the crusty and somehow legendary father of the play's two protagonists, a pair of obsessive siblings who also happen to be lovers. Personified here by the spectacularly watchable Stephen Payne, the Old Man manages to be mythic and real at the same time; ruthlessly selfish and benignly reasonable; somehow understandable in his desire to be housebound husband and father some of the time and unencumbered wanderer the rest. This Old Man is as in love with two different kinds of women as he is with the idea of choice and with another big idea—freedom. In the end, his complexities and inconsistencies bedevil his offspring rather badly. But there's something clear-eyed and enduring about this gnarled patriarch who can explain everything he does with the four-letter word that completes the play's title.

Which is not to suggest that Eddie, the broken-down (-up?) cowboy who is vainly determined to fight destiny and genes and not turn into another Old Man, isn't equally the fool; or that May, his sometimes cool-headed, sometimes hot-headed half-sister who is the object of his obsession, isn't also irrevocably caught up in a struggle she can resist but not win. Or even, for that matter, that preternatural innocent bystander Martin, who wanders into this love nest/death trap by sheer random chance, isn't somehow afflicted.

Director Tim Corcoran's vision of Fool for Love is simple and clear: we can't help what we do when we follow our hearts. And though this may seem, at first, like a superficial reading of Shepard's grotesque romantic comedy, the proof of its soundness is in the playing: 29th Street Rep's rendition is outstandingly successful. All four actors—David Mogentale (Eddie), Elizabeth Elkins (May), Tony DeVito (Martin), and the aforementioned Stephen Payne—do beautifully calibrated work here, creating vividly real people out of characters who might, under other circumstance, feel just archetypal. Somehow when Mogentale's Eddie does extravagantly over-the-top stuff like lassoing a bedpost or crawling on his posterior across the floor of the seedy motel room where Fool for Love takes place, it feels entirely natural: he's like people we know. And as he and Elkins play out the electric Guignol climax of Shepard's twisted narrative—in which the Old Man's bigamy begets tragedy for his unknowing wives and children—instead of feeling mythic and symbolic, it feels unaccountably and irredeemably true.

The show is played on a gritty, abstract set by CJ Howard, moodily lit by Douglas Cox and with booming, echoing sound effects by Tim Cramer. It's enacted with remarkable physicality and energy by its four-member ensemble. Mogentale bleats and simmers while Elkins smolders—opposites intractably bonded; opponents perfectly matched. DeVito, large and awkward and uncomfortable in his skin as Martin, the emissary from the real world, is palpably alien. The fight sequence between DeVito and Mogentale is spectacularly raw. Overseeing all the action is Payne, on the sidelines (actually in a car seat all the way downstage), witness to the carnage his quest for love has spawned, a figure at once passive and powerful, so that when he actually gets up to address us we feel somehow honored by the mere act of rising.

Corcoran's take on Fool for Love is certainly not the only way to stage this play, or even necessarily the best possible one. But it sure works: the  electricity on stage right now at 29th Street Rep is a welcome and much-needed jolt during these winter doldrums.

Gillette turns out to be problematic play. On the one hand, it's a story of the road—of two men from someplace on their way to somewhere else. The men are Mickey Hollister, a middle-aged drifter who claims only to want his freedom, which he has decided he'll find on a fishing boat in Alaska; and Bobby Nobis, very young, very brash, very inexperienced—looking for undefined and unknowable somethings to write songs about, anywhere but in the Texas town he hails from. Before the play even begins, Mickey and Bobby have hooked up, and now they've arrived in the oil boomtown of Gillette, Wyoming, where Mickey calculates the two of them can accumulate enough "coin" to get them to their respective destinations.

You'll note, though, that the play is called Gillette rather than "Mickey and Bobby," and that's the source of the problem I told you about. Mickey and Bobby are clearly the play's protagonists; one could even argue that they're the same protagonist at different ages, and the play's chief conceit could well be that each is going to learn what he needs to know about life from the other: Mickey will remember the dreams that drove him to search for freedom in the first place, and Bobby will gain some of those experiences that will set him on the path to finding that self-same freedom on his own.

Lots of Gillette feels like it's going just that way: comical episodes like the one where Bobby gets (literally) nailed to the floor by a vicious bully and rescued by ever-resourceful Mickey; a lyrical scene in which Mickey shows Bobby the beauty and joy of camping out under the stars; and a shocking fight scene in which Mickey teaches Bobby the most important life lesson of all. What's missing, you will note, is the other half of this presumed symbiosis: I had trouble, throughout the piece, understanding exactly what Mickey was getting out of his relationship with Bobby.

But again, recall the title. Playwright William Hauptman, though giving over much of his running time to his two hero/anti-heroes, hasn't really set out to write about them at all. Gillette is, I think, intended to be about the way-station where Mickey and Bobby's dreams (and by extension, American men's dreams in general), get derailed. It's about a place and a social order and institutions that test people: Hauptman wants to deal in Sam Shepard-esque archetypes and the mythology of the American West to explore what it means to be a Man.  Trouble is, Mickey and Bobby are placed in very specific circumstances in a very specific time (1981, complete with oddly jarring references to the Ayatollah Khoumeni and the oil crisis): there's finally very little archetypal about them or the other folks—bosses, bullies, prostitutes, etc.—whom they encounter in Gillette.

So, the play that The Storm Theatre has taken up this time around is a bit of a mess. The production, directed by Peter Dobbins, is not: though we're sometimes puzzled by where the author is trying to take us, the journey is always compelling and entertaining. The big story in this show is that it marks the off-Broadway debut of NFL hall of famer John Riggins; in the role of Mickey, he proves appealingly outsized and magnetic, dominating the proceedings through sheer force of personality. As Bobby, Eric Alperin captures the naiveté and eagerness perfectly; he's perhaps a little too obviously outclassed by Riggins' sheer bigness for their match-up to feel even, however.

Others in the company deliver fine work, especially Kevin Villers as the indomitable boss Booger McCoy, Shaula Chambliss as Brenda, a hooker whom Mickey falls in love with, Genia Michaela as Jody, who becomes Bobby's love interest, and Eric Thorne as Sonny, the bully with the hammer and nails. Michelle Malavet's unit set enables Dobbins to keep transitions seamless and quick; and her vision of Mickey and Bobby's eccentric home under the stars is actually quite lovely. Lively rock music by Jeremiah Lockwood, performed by him and members of the company, provides an appropriate backdrop for the proceedings.

So even if the play itself fails finally to satisfy, there's much to appreciate in Dobbins' production. Hauptman gives us lots to ponder in Gillette—as well as one of the single funniest lines I've ever heard uttered on stage (you'll have to see the show to find out what it is). Hauptman won a Tony Award for the musical Big River back in 1985; yet this play, written the same year, is only now getting its New York premiere, which says a lot about how we treat our dramatists and about Storm's commitment to bringing interesting, provocative, potentially "lost" drama to our city's stages.

Any play that contains the line "He only went into the Army in order to put his moustache to good purpose" is almost certainly worth doing. Perkasie Theatre Company, an off-off-Broadway troupe whose mission is to produce neglected contemporary plays, has found Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus for us, which contains that deathless line and hundreds of others just as understatedly hilarious. Thanks, Perkasie.

Habeas Corpus turns out be an enormously funny farce. It was written in the early '70s, which places it  midway between Joe Orton's politically motivated  deconstruction of the genre in the Sixties and Michael Frayn's liberating reconstruction of it with Noises Off in 1982. While Orton and Frayn get revived regularly, Bennett's piece, which had just a brief run in New York its first time around, has been unjustly forgotten.

When you see Habeas Corpus, though, (and you should), you won't forget it. Set on a mostly bare stage that manages to be all the rooms of a country house and its garden without ever forgetting for a second that it's also a stage, Habeas Corpus is a farce about the nature of farce. A maid (who else?) is our guide into the play's cockeyed world; a lusty doctor who is all bark and no bite personifies the play's point of view, and even sums it up in a Restoration comedy-type epilogue: "So this is my prescription/Grab any chance you get/Because if you take it or you leave it/You end up with regret."

Sharing the stage with doctor and maid are an oversized sex-hungry matron and her undersized would-be paramour, a slow-witted young hypochondriac and a flat-chested spinster with a brand new set of falsies, and a bombastic military widow and her blonde bombshell daughter. And oh, yes: there're also a falsies' salesman, a peeping-tom vicar, and a suicidal young man with a noose. These characters occupy themselves for two acts by alternately groping and  misunderstanding each other until a Perfectly Reasonable Explanation is offered for everything that's transpired. Every bit of it is rendered with the driest wit possible: the gags sneak up on you and then reduce you to helpless giggles.

The company puts the show over commendably, although there is one bit of miscasting that harms the piece--Robert Meksin is simply too tall and well-built to do justice to the aptly named Sir Percy Shorter. Brad Makarowski (as the hypochondriac son), Carrie Brewer (as the flat-chested would-be sexpot), Kim Reiss (as the clueless bombshell), and Brian Linden (as the repressed vicar) score the most laughs. Steven Keim's staging has all the right impulses and as the company becomes more comfortable with the requisite split-second timing the pacing will undoubtedly improve.

All in all, Perkasie has done us a great service in placing Habeas Corpus back on our radar. Their production of it is grand fun, an exemplary specimen of off-off-Broadway at its worthiest.

As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a professional production of Pirandello's Henry IV in New York since 1993. That's far too long: imagine eight years elapsing between Hamlets or Macbeths. Except for a few big names, we don't see enough productions of plays from the non-English speaking world here in New York. Experiencing and appreciating the works of someone like Pirandello is essential to understanding how theatre–and, by extension, the world in general–has evolved over the last hundred years.

So we must be grateful to The Storm Theatre for putting this intensely challenging play on, and giving many New Yorkers such as myself a first chance to witness this famous work on the stage (as opposed to on the page). Their production, staged by associate artistic director John Regis, is energetic and forceful and consistently rewarding. If the enigmatically layered portrayal of the title character by Dan Berkey at the center of this revival fails to yield a pat and satisfying answer to the riddle of the play's meaning, it nevertheless sets us en route to unraveling that riddle on our own, which in the long run may be the more valuable result.

Henry IV, written in 1922, is set in a villa in Italy. Here, a madman who thinks he is the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, lives in a world of mostly solitary invention. He's supported by his nephew, Charles, who has supplied him with the trappings of his imagined existence in the form of a perfectly rendered replica of the Emperor's throne room and a small retinue of male servants who pretend to live in the same century (i.e., the 11th) as their master.

Into this rarefied world one day come a Doctor, a Marchioness and her daughter, and a Baron, all with the express notion to help Charles "cure" his uncle of his insanity. The Marchioness's daughter Frida is Charles's fiancée; the Marchioness herself was once loved (unrequitedly) by Charles's uncle. Significantly, the Baron and the Marchioness were present at the event that led to Henry's present condition: at a costume gala, he fell from a horse and injured his head. Because he was dressed as the Emperor Henry IV at that time, it is thought, he believed himself to actually be the Emperor. And so he has been for fifteen years–until, this gathering hopes, today.

The secret at the heart of the play–which is not so secret at all, mind you–is that Henry isn't any madder than you or me. In a climactic scene that will surprise you even though you know it's coming, he reveals the crafty ruse that has led him to pretend to be Henry IV for some or all of the past decade and a half. The reason I can tell you this is that the real secret of the play is between the actor playing Henry and the audience; only together can we figure out whether Henry is really play-acting or in earnest. Or perhaps both at once.

Dan Berkey, a remarkable actor who has appeared in plays as different from each other and this one as Arrah-na-Pogue and Stavrogin's Confession, certainly doesn't feed us an easy answer. He shows us, instead, facets and layers of a man forced to–or determined to–play roles to survive his time on earth. Berkey's Henry is cagey, funny, charming, scary, and always–always–testing: his surroundings, his audience, his fellow actors, himself. It's a take on the character that doesn't ground the piece so much as plant it in shifting, uncertain terrain.

It's in marked contrast to the more expected, centered approach taken by his colleagues in the company, from Peter Dobbins's gently smart, supportive Lolo (one of the Emperor's "servants") to Bill Roulet's dignified and unflappable butler John; and from Evangelia Constantakos' distressed, self-involved Marchioness to Laurence Drozd's arch, vaguely untrustworthy Baron. Brian Whisenant, Hugh Brandon Kelly, and Brett Hammerling are similarly on-key as the other hired men, while Eric Thorne (Charles), Adriene Erdos (Frida), and Carl Pasbjerg (the Doctor) turn in solid work as well.

The play is difficult: why, I wonder, did Pirandello choose such an arcane alter ego for his hero if not to make his audience work much harder than usual to get to the heart of his play. But Henry IV is also richly rewarding, and this production leaves us hungry for more. Bravo for the Storm, as they continue to mount plays we've seldom or never seen before but should have. And bravo to the next brave company that picks up the gauntlet and tackles Henry IV, giving us another much-needed opportunity to plumb the depths of this modern classic.

Harold Brighouse's play Hobson's Choice is, I suppose, a valuable document of what English society was like in 1915 (when it was written) and 1880 (when it takes place). But the picture it paints is not at all a pretty one: what struck me as I watched the Atlantic Theatre's revival of this long-winded, badly dated play was how unapologetically grasping our forefathers and -mothers seem to have been. Hobson's Choice is a tribute to—nay, a celebration of—paternalistic capitalism. The only goal worth having, it tells us, is to make a great deal of money. The only reason to care about people, it goes on to say, is to get them to do what you want them to do. A wretched sort of morality, this: the very worst of the principles that western society is built on.

This is not, mind you, what Hobson's Choice is about—not at all: this is a supposedly warm-hearted domestic comedy about a blustery, tyrannical shoe merchant who bossily dominates his three daughters, until he gets his come-uppance when the eldest and most independent-minded of the them decides to marry one of his bootmakers.

Interestingly, Brian Murray, the fine, experienced actor who plays Hobson pere, finds little to like in his character and turns in a surprisingly hammy performance that is entertaining and adorable but cagily dishonest. As quick-witted Maggie, the daughter who makes the unexpected marital choice of the title, Martha Plimpton plays it straight, resulting in a portrayal of resolute unpleasantness; see paragraph one of this review.

Others in the cast are similarly defeated by the repellent natures of their characters, with the exception of Jim Frangione, who plays Tubby Wadlow, a likeable fellow who is the story's token working stiff. David Aaron Baker is appealing as Maggie's husband-victim, Will Mossop, but he too is mowed under by the thing's warped values.

It's possible that this is precisely the moment to investigate our imperialist past (though perhaps a more substantial work might serve that purpose better). All I can say is that I had a fairly lousy time at Hobson's Choice, finding it deficient both as social history and as entertainment. A most disagreeable evening of theatre. 

In general, if you were a successful American playwright in the '50s and '60s and you're not Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Edward Albee, or Neil Simon, then your work is probably not being looked at much by contemporary audiences. This is a shame, as the current revival of Robert Anderson's I Never Sang for My Father potently demonstrates. We can't really understand how we got to where we are without lingering a little over where we were: works like this one, reflective of a moment in our collective history from not so very long ago, have much to show us about ourselves.

The drama of fathers and sons is one of the enduring American theatrical themes: Anderson and I Never Sang for My Father help mark the transition from the cataclysmic vision of Arthur Miller to the apocalyptic vision of Sam Shepard. Their more politically-charged plays look outward from the damaged central relationship; Anderson's looks inward, searching for a way to reconcile the ferocious, prideful self-made American male with the smooth, sophisticated, painfully insecure generation that followed.

I Never Sang for My Father tells the story of Gene Garrison, a forty-year-old widower who finds himself forced to deal with his parents as they cope with the effects of old age. Gene and his mother, Margaret, have a loving and supportive relationship, but his father Tom remains emotionally distant even as he realizes the extent to which he must depend on his son. Gene tells us that he wants to love his father, but cannot; as the events of the play unfold, there are moments when Gene comes close to reaching Tom, but genuine reconciliation and respect are, not surprisingly, unachievable.

Tom is a marvelous creation–bitter, difficult, proud, heroic: a self-made mogul who labored hard to provide for his family but lacked the means to give them the emotional support they craved; a self-involved, borderline senile old bore who complains that everyone he knows only wants to tell the story of their lives, even as he repeats and repeats his own. All of us know–maybe even have–fathers like Tom. One of the triumphs of Anderson's work is the way he takes us into Tom's head, letting us recognize some of the instincts–for survival, for recognition, for respect–that helped create this unlovable monster. We can't like Tom, but we can understand him.

Gene stands in for us, confronting inevitable issues about caring for parents, trying to balance his own needs and desires with responsibilities real and perceived. Today we'd be tempted to call his relationship with his mother co-dependent, but it's lovely to see a mother and son as simpatico as these two; united, to be sure, by bonds to the father that are as unwanted now as they are unbreakable; but also by genuine affection and mutual admiration.

Anderson sketches a complex family dynamic here, and impressively it mostly holds together thirty-odd years after its creation. (What does feel dated is the pyschoanalytic backchat between Gene and his hostile older sister Alice; theories of human behavior go out of style, but the way people behave never really changes, right?)

Terese Hayden is to be thanked, first of all, for putting this fascinating play on the stage again; and also for doing such a fine job with it. Anderson is exceedingly well-served by Hayden's modest but essential production, and also by some intelligent actors who probe his characters and succeed in bringing them to life, notably Jacqueline Brookes (Margaret), Charles D. Cissel (Gene), James Stevenson (Tom), and Jill Van Note (Alice). The production moves a little more slowly than it might, but I attended the very first performance so the pacing is likely to improve. Stevenson doesn't yet show us Tom's ferocity, but his performance is marvelously detailed; whoever thought up the idea of having him create a paper airplane out of a discarded letter in the play's climactic scene has found a brilliant means to get us under the character's skin.

Forty years from now, a theatre company like New York's indomitable Mint will rescue a play like I Never Sang for My Father from neglect and show our descendents what we were really like in 1968. Happily, we don't have to wait: for two weeks, this insightful and moving family drama is being given its due at Theatre 22.

Icarus & Aria is Kirk Wood Bromley's response to/rendition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The Montagues are a family of Mexican-Americans; Mercutio is Icarus' brother, an extravagant outlaw named Primalo. The Capulets are the wealthy Jones clan, headed up by Jimmy Senior, an All-American entrepreneur whose possessions include a football franchise called the Phoenix Aztechs, for which team Icarus is the newest rising star.

The outlines of Shakespeare's plot are all here: Icarus and Aria meet at a dance and fall in love at first sight; Aria's brother Jimmy Junior gets killed by Primalo's gang (though not by Icarus); Icarus and Aria run off and are "wed" by an itinerant, possibly crazy, Medicine Woman. But Icarus & Aria is not principally or even particularly about star-crossed love. Instead, Bromley uses the familiar story to remind us of several more contemporary tragedies that plague us these days: deep-rooted prejudice, for one, and its insidious effect—i.e., the institutionalized bigotry that seeds lawless men like Primalo; and rampant media overload, personified by the trio of news anchors who narrate and propel the story. They're our gateway into the world of Icarus & Aria, yet they are singularly unaffected by the very real suffering that they witness and report. The question, Bromley seems to ask, is: are we?

Pared down for this revival to just under two hours in length, the text remains dense and copious and gorgeous and unwieldy: brimming with characters and ideas, Icarus & Aria is both exhausting and exhilarating. Bromley tells the love story we expect and the greater social tragedy that frames it; he also has fun playing with names and words, punning and riffing at breakneck speed. The pyrotechnics are dazzling but not so controlled as in newer Bromley works like The American Revolution or Syndrome, and indeed fans of the Bromley oeuvre will detect characters and notions that feel like rough drafts of more realized versions of themselves in later plays.

With its dozens of characters and scenes, Icarus & Aria is no small challenge for an off-off-Broadway company to pull off, and this production, though not seriously flawed, is erratic. Director Joshua Spafford has cast many roles in what we euphemistically call nontraditional ways, so that some of the Mexican characters are played by actors who are obviously not Hispanic and vice versa. It's a commendable idea, but I'm not sure this is the vehicle for it: instead, it makes an already difficult play even harder to follow, as we sit, puzzled, trying to figure out who's related to whom. Similarly, the very capable Billie James has been cast as Icarus' agent Maximus, who is repeatedly referred to by other characters using masculine pronouns; yet Ms. James plays the role as a female (certainly attired as one). I'm all for shaking up gender identities, but is that really the point of Bromley's play?

More problematic, though, is the way that inexperience (and, I suspect, a shorter-than-needed rehearsal schedule) tell on too many of the actors involved. Genuinely strong performances are offered by Michael Kayne as Icarus and Inverse stalwarts Alan Benditt and Robert Laine in several small roles apiece; but too often words and/or intentions get garbled by a cast that seems mostly not quite ready to tackle this demanding work.

Bromley is unequivocally a giant among contemporary American playwrights; the impulse to celebrate his brilliance is a commendable one. But it seems to me that a revival of an early play like Icarus & Aria needs to be absolutely first class to be really valuable; newer, stronger, better plays are what Bromley needs to shore up his burgeoning reputation. That said, a Bromley play is always an energizing adventure in theatregoing; count on Icarus & Aria for a refreshing jolt or two of the electric thrill that only a true original can provide.

Thorough if not extensive research suggests that Macbett has never been produced by a professional theatre company in New York City; this surprising bit of information all by itself makes Revolving Shakespeare's revival of this 1972 play by Eugene Ionesco newsworthy and important. Whether or not the play holds up nearly thirty years after it was written–and as we shall see in a moment, I have some doubts on this point–it is essential that it be given a hearing. Artistic director Ralph Carhart, producing director Daniel Colb Rothman, and director Kip Rosser must be congratulated for providing New York with a belated but very necessary look at this neglected work from one of the 20th century's master playwrights.

What we discover, interestingly, is something of a museum piece: though it follows The Chairs and Rhinoceros chronologically in the Ionesco canon, Macbett feels even more dated than those plays do, so rooted in the antiwar activism of the late sixties/early seventies is this defiantly serious comedy. In the decade of Kent State, Watergate, and Oh! Calcutta!, Macbett would, I imagine, have been provocative if not downright explosive. Today, though, in terms of both substance and style, Macbett can't help but be passé: we've subverted the established forms of government and theatre too much for Ionesco's tweaking and twitting to have much of an effect.

Perhaps conscious of that, Rosser and his Revolving Shakespeare colleagues have elected to mount something akin to a pageant around Macbett. With set/lighting designer Roman Tatarowicz and costume designer Jim Parks, Rosser has filled the stage with gorgeous, resonant images of warfare and statecraft that provide commentary–sometimes ironic, sometimes not–on the dubious virtues of each. I suspect that Ionesco chose to adapt (pervert?) one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies to remind modern audiences that whenever we unquestioningly receive works that glorify or romanticize the so-called nobility of war, we implicate ourselves in the lie such works perpetuate. Rosser reminds us of this in his Macbett, over and over again.

It makes for a clear, comprehensible vision. What's lost, unfortunately, is the sensational fizz that I presume Ionesco was also hoping for. Some, alas, can't be recreated: Lady Duncan stripping down to a bikini, for example, has no capacity to shock in 2001, though it might have in 1972. But Rosser's pacing, which is stately rather than antic, too often feels like it's at half-speed. To be fair, some of the difficulty comes from using high-concept settings on a low-tech budget: it simply takes a long time to move the scenery around. But some of the scenes, like the one in which Macbett and then Banco have the same exchange with a nearby soldier, would play better if they were twice as fast.

I realize that I need to pause for a moment and tell you that Macbett is similar to yet entirely unlike William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Ionesco has essentially supplied a good deal of the back story–i.e., what happened before the Thane of Glommis betrayed Duncan; and he's also imagined very different identities for the witches and for Lady Macbeth herself. Ambition figures less importantly here than the naked lust for power; the tragedy is finally not Macbeth's alone but society's. Macbett is a portrait of corrupt, self-serving institutions that think nothing of exploiting ordinary people (soldiers, workers) to ensure their own survival. Like I said: very sixties.

It's also very funny, in places, and very smart. Rosser has cast the piece well, with solid work in the leading roles (Theseus Roche as Macbett, Miles Phillips as Banco, James Leach as Duncan, Kim Patton as Lady Duncan) and excellent support from five actors who play what feels like a thousand different roles (Jonathan Green, Lanie MacEwan, Matthew Pendergast, Dara Seitzman, and Andrew Thacher). This is as expert an ensemble as you'll find off-off-Broadway.

My cultural education has been enhanced by this worthy production; I had a pretty good time, too. See Macbett for either reason. (But see it soon: it only runs one more week.)

It is not an overstatement to claim that Heiner Müller is one of the most important German dramatists of the 20th century, second to perhaps only Brecht, and since his death in late 1995, there has been renewed interest in Müller’s plays in the US. As an admirer of his work–of his experiments with dramatic form and his ability to capture the epic sweep of history–there is always reason to celebrate when a production of Müller’s work opens in NYC. That said, however, there isn’t much to celebrate about Cx & Company’s productions of Medeamaterial (1982) and Quartet (1981). While director Cradeaux Alexander’s program confirms Müller’s strength as a writer, the director’s choices don’t add to the material, but detract from the power and humor of the plays.

The evening opens with Medeamaterial. Alexander turns the piece into a monologue in which he himself stars. By removing Medeamaterial from its context as part of a longer play, one of Müller’s “synthetic fragments” Despoiled Shore  Medeamaterial  Landscape with Argonauts, the piece is reduced to a retelling of the Medea story. This is not necessarily detrimental, but it does take away some of the power the piece gains from its juxtaposition with seemingly-unrelated material, where history, myth and personal material collide. Casting himself as Medea and making the Nurse and Jason offstage voices (spoken by the same person), Alexander doesn’t complicate the play, but rather makes it unnecessarily obtuse. The play’s kicker comes at the end. After giving a three-page monologue about her hatred and desire for her wayward husband, Medea turns to Jason and asks, “Nurse Do you know this man,” her affect transformed into indifference. The piece’s punch line, you could say, is punctured. The humor is missing because there is no one on stage but Alexander: Medea exists in a void. This problem is compounded by the cross-gender casting. Medea’s plight is that of the older woman scorned by her lover for a younger, more desirous woman. Having a well-sculpted man in his 20s ask, “Does this body/ Mean nothing anymore to you Jason,” renders Medea’s pain null and void. Turning her into a gym bunny doesn’t make Medeamaterial a more compelling play, despite the appealing visuals, because it neither makes any sense given the details of the story nor adds anything to our understanding of the Medea myth.

Quartet, based on de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, dramatizes the correspondences between Merteuil and Valmont as they seduce a virgin bride-to-be. Müller’s play has the two characters switch roles and enact the seduction of the maiden, with Merteuil, at one point, taking on the role of Valmont the seducer, and Valmont taking on the role of the virginal maiden. Like Medeamaterial, this is a play about aging, about a man and woman who fear the passing of time because it signals the inevitable end of their bodies as vehicles for sexual conquest. Alexander has four actors portray the two figures (Stacee Mandeville, Paul Hertel, Molly Harrington, Keith Francis Keating) and stages the play as a kind of erotic dance. There are moments when this works, but the main reason in casting four actors seems to be to add a homoerotic element to Merteuil’s and Valmont’s thirsts for sex and sadism, which could be interesting given how their heterosexual victories, therefore, become little more than narcissistic fulfillment. But again, while this addition makes for some interesting visuals, the actors are all too young to convey the characters’ desperation about aging and the homoeroticism is never adequately staged. Plus, little time appears to be spent on the play’s language. Quartet is composed of an intricate set of lengthy speeches interrupted by only the occasional moment of dialogue, and thus, the text demands careful attention. In not capturing the contours of Müller’s intricate prose, the production doesn’t pack much of a punch, despite the strong performance of Harrington as one of the Merteuils.

Müller’s work remains a constant source of fascination and pleasure for me. It is nice to see a director realize these plays on stage, for in Müller’s case especially, the plays sometimes appear unstageable. These productions, however, are far from satisfying. Cross-gendered casting and multiple actors in single roles can often create moments of real theatrical astonishment when used in conjunction with a fully-realized directorial vision. But alone, without a grounding in the world of the play, without a reading which substantiates their use, such techniques amount to little more than a gimmick. As a result, this evening of Müller’s plays remains a curiosity. For fans of Müller, one is happy that his work is being done, even if the results remain, in the final analysis, unrewarding.

So much of our enjoyment when we read (or watch) a mystery by Agatha Christie is that we know what to expect: five or six characters and one corpse. No one is leaving the premises, and the police will arrive soon. In this situation, most of us would sit tight and wait for the cops, hoping through the paranoia that the murderer won’t get us too. But in the world of Agatha Christie, people feel some primal urge to find the killer. Even when she’s taken too seriously to really be fun, as the Pulse Ensemble Theatre has done with Murder on the Nile, it’s easy to see why she’s one of the most popular writers of the 20th century. Her mysteries are intelligent, exciting, vividly realistic, perfectly crafted, familiar yet full of surprises. She finds pleasure in humanity, despite their malice and murders, so we can too.

In Murder on the Nile, the sealed parlor is a pleasure cruise down the Nile. The passengers—and we size each up as a potential suspect as soon as they walk onstage—include an upper-crust matron, her provincial working-girl niece, an indolent socialist, a pompous clergyman, and a European doctor. A juicy love triangle is introduced: the rich girl, her new husband, and her middle-class best friend, who is also the man’s ex-fiancée. The rich couple are on their honeymoon, chased across the Mediterranean by the jilted lover. One of these three will die by intermission.

Of course, it’s hard to watch this sort of work without feeling a little silly. It’s all so contrived: everyone has a motive, clues pop up just when we’ve run out of plot. Which is not to say they aren’t fun; that’s why they’re so popular. But ultimately, there’s not really much difference between the mysteries of Hercule Poirot (Christie's most popular character and the hero of the written version of Nile) and those of Scooby-Doo. After a half-century of cop thrillers and serial killers in the movies and TV, Christie’s mysteries are toys, goofy fun, balloons filled with hot air.

And the best moments in the show come when director Alexa Kelly suggests this in her staging. Each act begins with sweeping 1930s Hollywood music and a sexy cursive title announcing the location (“By the Temple of Abu Simbel”) projected on a curtain. And when it opens, we find, surprise! the same drab set. Midway through the second act, a gun pops up in the window, fires once, and slips down again like a puppet at some kids’ show. Certain actors give off the same in-on-the-joke attitude. Christine Karl, as the rich girl Kay Mostyn, vamps over the stage in great outfits like some ’30s film diva. Barret O’Brien plays her husband as a happy doofus who seems reconciled to being permanently bewildered wherever he is. And Frank Episale and Carlie McCarthy have moments as the richest socialist in the world and the most foolishly romantic typist in Edinburgh, especially during a ridiculous marriage proposal that appears out of nowhere in the final act. Most happily, Brian Richardson makes the unforgiving and nearly silent role of the ship’s African steward into a constant comedic commentary on the casual colonialism and racism of the European passengers.

But generally, this production comes across as too earnest, stifling the fun. It captures, maybe too well, the stodgy propriety that Christie’s pre-Beatles England perfected. There’s no sense of impending danger before the big murder, and no push to find the killer afterwards. Instead, the characters shout and stamp at each other but never act like someone has been shot. This problem is summed up by the fact that we never get to see the corpse, as if that would be too improper. Anything that might be shocking or unsettling (except the offhand racism) is kept offstage. The result is that we never get emotionally involved. Where we should be leaning forward, eagerly waiting for the next plot twist, we sit back in our chairs and watch the show roll on, strangely disconnected from the events before our eyes.

The final failure comes with the climax. The clergyman steps forward in the final act to explain whodunit and why, but only after he’s found the last clue and not told us. “It’s fantastic!” someone exclaims. “It’s fantastic but it’s true!” he pontificates. It may be true, but it’s unfair. The parson explains that he’s smarter than we are because he knew something we didn’t. And where his performance could be energized by the revelation, Nikos Valance instead turns us off by playing weedy British pomposity. The murderer actually surrenders, and lethargically fills in the motivation. With this, the balloon is punctured: all the fun is gone. We wait for the police to show up.

There are many excellent reasons why you will want to see Chris McElroen's stage adaptation of Richard Wright's Native Son at The Classical Theatre of Harlem. To begin with, it's terrific theatre: its story of a restless and angry young black man named Bigger Thomas, and how events drive him to unwittingly commit murder, and how that murder explosively destroys his life—well, it's a gripping tale, no doubt about it. It's been scripted and staged by McElroen with economy and compassion and intelligence and intensity. The action never flags; our keen interest in the play's dozen main characters keeps us riveted throughout.

The actors that McElroen has put on stage offer a second reason. As the protagonist, Ben Rivers gives a spectacularly good performance, letting us into Bigger's head and his heart, revealing the confusion, the bitterness, the disgust, and the simmering rage that propel him to apathy and violence. Johnnie Mae, as Bigger's mother Hannah, is monumental, bravely showing us her character's blotches and blemishes, wisely avoiding turning this woman into a suffering saint.

And there are other quite wonderful performances in Native Son: Tracy Johnson as Bigger's sometime girlfriend Bessie, George C. Hosmer as the bullying prosecutor Buckley; Jim Ganser and Arlene Nadel as the concerned but helpless parents of the white society girl who is Bigger's victim; and Dana Watkins as Jan Erlone, her boyfriend, an idealistic young Communist.

Chris Thomas's sets evoke the story's locales deftly and efficiently, from the stark poverty of the Thomas family's one-room apartment to the startling (by contrast) luxury of the mansion where Bigger goes to work as chauffeur. Thomas has also provided a simple but ingenious means of moving the sets which makes transitions between scenes seamless and cinematic. Kim Glennon's costumes convey useful information about the social status of each character, and Colin Young's lighting reflects both the shadowy private and the very public places where Bigger's story plays out. Stefan Jacobs' sound design, filled with mood-setting noise and music, enhances the production immeasurably. T.J. Glenn's fight choreography is convincing and exciting.

So, already, many reasons to journey up to 141st Street to see some exceptional theatre. Here's the last, possibly most important one: Native Son will make you think, hard, about issues that you need to think about. Native Son lays out ugly truths about racism that are necessary for all of us to confront. The central question of this play is, why does Bigger Thomas kill this white woman? Richard Wright, by way of dramatist McElroen, provides at least three answers: Bigger murders because it frees him and makes him a man (an existential response); Bigger murders because centuries of institutionalized injustice and oppression demand it (a social-economic-political response); Bigger murders because his victim deserved it (a moral response, by far the most disturbing one).

McElroen can't answer the question. But he can make us look hard at the evidence and think it through for ourselves. Truth and justice lie within each of us, finally. The power of Native Son, at this particular moment, is how resonant its themes are, not just in terms of black and white race relations in the U.S. right now, but in terms of the ways nations and religions warily eye one another, all over the world, all the time.

The Harlem School of the Arts is about fifteen minutes from Times Square on the A train. Take the journey: you'll find it to be a valuable one.

New plays on Broadway during the 1938-39 season included Lillian Hellmann's The Little Foxes, Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, to name just a few. (They don't call them the good old days for nothing.) But leave it to the Mint Theater to choose a lesser-known gem from that same year to end their current season: No Time for Comedy, by S.N. Behrman. Though you probably aren't familiar with this sparkling and unexpectedly insightful piece, it will almost certainly resonate with you more strongly right now than its more famous contemporaries. No Time for Comedy asks a spectacularly fundamental question—does a person have the right to sit on the sidelines and merely observe when the world seems to explode with violence and evil—and then serves up arguments pro and con with intelligence and wit and grand sophistication. Thought-provoking and entertaining, No Time for Comedy is also remarkably timely. In Kent Paul's smart, stylish production, and with a splendid cast headed by the spellbinding Leslie Denniston, the Mint's latest "worthy but neglected" play is a true find, one that needs to be on your spring theatregoing list.

No Time for Comedy takes place during a very eventful 24 hours in the life of playwright Gaylord Easterbrook. Gay, as he is known, is the successful author of a string of frothy hit comedies, the last three of which were written for his wife, Linda. It's the fall of 1938, and Linda is looking for a new play to star in, but Gay has none; in fact, as No Time for Comedy begins, Gay is nowhere to be found. Linda and her maid, the crusty, dependable Mary, are ringing up Gay's favorite haunts, expecting to find him hung over in some Broadway saloon.

Enter—unexpectedly—Philo Smith, a wealthy, middle-aged banker whom Linda met at a party the other night, with some most disturbing news. Gay, Philo says, is at this very moment at Philo's house, being entertained by Philo's young second wife Amanda. Amanda likes to inspire artistic men to realize their inner greatness, Philo tells Linda; both quickly agree that Gay—along with, perhaps, both of their marriages—is in some danger.

Linda leaps into action. Abetted by both Philo and her charming but shallow pal Makepeace Lovell, she sails into battle with Amanda, in the most wittily polite depiction of a catfight on stage this side of The Importance of Being Earnest. Gay's dilemma turns out to be genuine and compelling:  with the very real specter of fascism looming in Spain, Italy, and Germany, he has lost faith in the worth of the comic plays he has been churning out for years. He wants to write about important issues; he's even talking about going to Spain himself, where the Civil War still rages, to gain some real-life experience away from the rarefied world he has heretofore occupied so comfortably.

And so while we're not even looking, this well-made romantic comedy quite unexpectedly morphs into something genuinely substantial, considering fundamental questions of morality and responsibility. Long speeches delivered by Gay and Philo turn out to be not-so-thinly disguised arguments for and against American involvement in what would soon be World War II. And Gay's entirely understandable crisis of conscience follows us home after No Time for Comedy's curtain has rung down: finally each of us has to sort out what we think our obligations to humanity—and our fellow human beings—ultimately are. (The events of September 11 will no doubt color those thoughts; that's why the Mint is so smart to mount this particular play at this particular moment.)

Yet Behrman's remarkably skillful play remains resolutely Linda's story, and her anchoring presence makes No Time for Comedy the completely satisfying comedy of manner and ideas that it is.

Director Kent Paul offers a sublimely good staging of the play, one that is rooted securely in the piece's period and theme. The cast is marvelous: Leslie Denniston, whose work I have not seen before, is a revelation as Linda—gracious, sophisticated, and smart, she is the epitome of 1930s Broadway leading lady chic. Hope Chernov, as rival Amanda, proves very much her match; Diane Ciesla (Mary), Ted Pejovich (Philo), and Shawn Sturnick (Lovell) offer invaluable support. As Gay, Simon Brooking shows us both the surface suavity that has carried him through life thus far and the brooding intelligence that now gnaws at him underneath. Tony Andrea's well-appointed sets and Jayde Chabot's stylishly appropriate costumes provide the ideal environment for Paul's fine realization of the work.

I love theatre that lets me lose myself in an engaging story filled with interesting, articulate characters; and I love theatre that lets me find myself, having confronted some fundamental aspect of the human condition. It's rare for one play to do both: No Time for Comedy is one of those exceptions. Don't miss it.

Three Victorian explorers stand on a beach checking their gear in preparation for a journey inland. The trio are female, and have teamed up to prove their expertise to their male peers by venturing into Terra Incognita—unknown land. They have neither maps nor guides, and don’t know about local customs or languages. Their odyssey will take them off the edge of the known world, and what they find makes up On The Verge, Eric Overmyer’s classic play from 1985. A new production by Pandora’s Box presents this charming play with wide-eyed whimsy that reflects the play’s fun but not its depth.

As the women trek inland, the explorers—Alexandra, Fanny, and Mary—find strange artifacts: a new invention called the eggbeater, a brick of cream cheese, a button declaring “I Like Ike.” They meet natives, such as a rhyming troll guarding a rope-bridge who reveals that he’s actually a beatnik method actor working a day job. The explorers are surprised when they spontaneously utter enigmatic phrases like “Cool Whip” and “Mr. Coffee.” Terra Incognita turns out to be one of the most distant and unmappable of countries: the future.

The play is subtitled "The Geography of Yearning," and the characters yearn palpably for the future. The play’s displaced sense of time seems to extend to the choice of venues, an Episcopal Church off Washington Square; consecrated spaces like churches contain an inertia that suggests eternity, which is the opposite of time and change. In the production, Mary, played by Kate Hall, personifies the feeling of reverse nostalgia: an anthropologist, she trips over herself to discuss the local customs with every person she meets. She keeps shooting her friends sidelong glances as her theories are confirmed; she knows she’s smart and the most suited for future-travel. Strangely, she’s more modern than Alexandra, who goes by Alex, rides a bicycle, takes photographs, and wears trousers when climbing mountains. Alex, played by Stina Nielsen, is fresh-faced and credulous, an id who can’t wait to see what’s beyond the next peak. Though Kara Tsiaperas doesn’t develop Fanny’s character as fully as her fellow actresses do, she carries off the best single moment of the play. When Fanny meets a mysterious man from her hometown—Terre Haute, Indiana—she’s informed that her husband remarried and died in the 1920s. She then realizes that she and her comrades can’t return home, and, with a look of loss tempered by an explorer’s resolve, decides to press forward. History is cyclical, she declares, and in that moment, she herself transcends history.

The entire play comforts the audience with the thought that ideas remain though the bric-a-brac changes. It’s a very Eastern concept, obscured by the production’s postmodern fascinations with junk and language. Director Steve Ramshur connects these two ideas closely: each scene begins with the dinging of an old cash register and an announcement of a new scene title. Marc Gwinn’s effects sound like they were dubbed from Richard Foreman’s archives, but they make the same point that Overmyer’s script makes when the creep of slang scandalizes Fanny and fascinates Alex. The superficial changes in speech and sound are often the most remarked upon but the least profound.

By concentrating on these facets of the play, the production often substitutes postmodern observations for universal insights. Only in the final moments does it find the play’s ambivalent view of the future: when they reach 1955, the most Victorian of the trio, Fanny, settles in comfortably, but so does Alex. This wink at the multiple cultures of the past is glib, but it is followed by a disquieting reversal. Mary moves into the future alone, and as she does, she recites a litany of cultural detritus, conjuring the world of Beatles and word processing but also the domino theory and nuclear meltdowns. Mary, lacking context for the words, finds wonder in all of them; but she unsettles an audience that has lived through these wildly disjointed times. It’s a strange note to end on, and runs against the earlier goofy tone; that’s why it’s a wonderful moment.

A pair of actors in their 60s playing George and Emily? A teenage girl playing the Stage Manager? What’s going on here?! It’s nothing more than the Transport Group’s glorious new production of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning classic, Our Town, in which the aforementioned casting becomes the coup that director Jack Cummings III intends it to be, bringing a freshness to this reliable, old chestnut that must be seen to be believed.

As the young lovers, George and Emily, Tom Ligon and Barbara Andres make up in experience and simplicity what they lack in physical youth. The emotion required for their scenes together—especially their pivotal Act II scene in the soda shop—would embarrass younger, less-experienced actors. But, Ligon and Andres are old enough to no longer be embarrassed by such displays. Their own lives are a wellspring from which they can draw any emotion they need. They’re not afraid to be vulnerable in public, which is about as genuine as youth gets, and which also brings a depth, a weight, and a newness to Our Town that I haven’t before experienced in other productions of the play.

Emma Orelove makes up in enthusiasm what she lacks in seasoning in the lynchpin role of the Stage Manager. Hers is not a lethargic, neutral, old-salt Stage Manager, but one who has an opinion about the story she’s telling, which includes her joy in telling it.

Director Cummings adds many little nuances that help renew Our Town. For example, early in Act III, the Stage Manager crouches down, and cups the town of Grover’s Corners (Our Town’s New England setting) in her hands. This action suggests that the play is nothing more than the invention of our adolescent Stage Manager: a world she’s created in the privacy of her room, where the thoughts and feelings that kids have are often bigger and deeper than they get credit for. It hints at, and reinforces, the “eternal part” of Our Town, and is one of many little ingenious moves that Cummings makes throughout the show.

The ensemble is excellent, adding little bits of behavior that flesh out the smaller parts more than in any other production of Our Town I’ve ever seen. Particular standouts include Jeff Edgerton and Robyn Hussa as Emily’s parents, James Weber and Julia Siefkes as George’s parents, Jonathan Uffelman as Professor Willard, Monica Russell as Mrs. Soames, and John Wellmann as Simon Stimson.

Pianist Mary-Mitchell Campbell leads an excellent three piece band, featuring Audrey Terry on cello and singer Jenni Frost, that plays hymns and variations on the Shaker melody “Simple Gifts” (or Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” depending on one’s frame of reference) throughout the show. Cummings use of music is dynamic, and, for the most part, helps him and the cast tell the story without making the audience feel spoon-fed or manipulated. Set designer John Story, lighting designer R. Lee Kennedy, and costume designer Kathryn Rohe also make valuable contributions.

Transport Group has plenty of love and respect for Our Town, without any of the inhibiting reverence that prevents the company from trying new things in order to keep it relevant. The risks they take succeed incredibly well, and result in what is probably the best overall production of Our Town I’ve ever seen. Not bad for a group’s debut production, huh? They’re clearly a company on the rise, and one that should be watched closely, and eagerly, for a long time to come.

The Irondale Ensemble Project’s current production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan at Theater for the New City not only provides great nourishment for the soul and the imagination, it also contains prime examples of top-notch ensemble acting and directorial invention, and points the way towards re-interpreting classic stories for other theater companies. To miss it is to miss New York theater at its absolute finest.

Opting to leave behind Peter Pan’s reputation as a children’s story, Irondale has crafted a dreamy, Lord of the Flies-type free-for-all that is darker and sadder than its Broadway musical counterpart. They’ve even included Barrie himself as the narrator, thus making the story more personal and very truly his. Peter Pan seems to function as Barrie’s way of working out his feelings about lost youth, the trials and confusions of growing up, and, as stated in the press release, “the desolation of adulthood.” The result is more mournful and unnerving than what the public is used to, but no less fun.

Director Jim Niesen has retained all of the story’s familiar elements, but has given them all a new luster. For instance, the Lost Boys still remain an integral part of the story, but, the actors playing them almost never pretend to be children. Niesen also resists the urge to make anyone really fly. The actors are given the rungs of a horizontal ladder and a huge rope net backdrop for that purpose. And, for the tick-tocking crocodile, Niesen arranges the entire cast into a single, rhythmic shape that glides menacingly across the stage. It’s one of the most inventive and peculiar things I’ve ever seen on a stage.

The nine-member cast are all superb, splitting up twenty-six roles with such aplomb, and switching back and forth between them so effortlessly, that one would swear there were more of them on stage than there really are. Particular standouts include Jack Lush as Peter, Rezeile Caravaca as Wendy, Damen Scranton as Barrie, Michael-David Gordon as Captain Hook, Melissa Jayme as Tinkerbell, and Sven Miller in his trifecta as Nana the Dog, Toodles (one of the Lost Boys), and Starkey (one of the pirates).

The designers—Randy Glickman (lights), Christianne Myers & T. Michael Hall (costumes), and Ken Rothchild (sets)—have all collaborated to create one of the most evocative and inventively designed productions I’ve seen in a long, long time. And, Peter Pan also boasts a wonderfully sad and beautiful original score by Walter Thompson that’s played live by three excellent musicians on piano, woodwinds, and percussion.

In tackling such a tried-and-true tale, and turning it a bit on its ear, Irondale has reclaimed Peter Pan for adults. Which is a boon for all theatergoers.